On the efficiency of dynamic multicast mobility anchor selection in DMM: Use cases and analysis

The ever-increasing mobile Internet traffic has led to the development of a new IP mobility management concept in the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) - distributed mobility management (DMM). Based on the fact that the mobile Internet traffic will be dominated by the mobile video, the scalability and bandwidth efficiency from multicast routing makes the IP multicast play more important role. In DMM, IP multicast can be enabled by deploying the MLD proxy function at the mobility access router (MAR). The MAR at which the multicast flow is initiated is used as a multicast mobility anchor (MMA) for this flow. In case of mobility, the multicast traffic is tunneled from the anchor to the current MAR. As a result, the movement of the listener causes several issues for the ongoing multicast flow such as service disruption, non-optimal routing (end-to-end delay) and the tunnel convergence problem. In some cases, it is almost impossible to meet the requirements in terms of service disruption and delay (e.g., for the real-time and delay-sensitive services). In this paper, we introduce a dynamic MMA selection mechanism in order to mitigate these issues. The MMA selection takes into account such contexts as the multicast service, the mobile node´s mobility and the network. Numerical results show that by selecting the appropriate MMA, these requirements can be satisfied even for services with stringent interruption and delay constraints.